Inspiration
❗️Did you know that out of 4 million total births in the United States, about 28,000 newborns get switched every year? This translates to about 1 mistake per 1000 baby transfers to and in the hospital nursery or NICU!👼
As busy as hospitals are today such that overworked and exhausted healthcare employees are becoming more and more common, modern baby swaps, unfortunately, seem to occur more frequently.
Usually, every newborn has two identification bands: one on the wrist and one on the ankle. However, these bands, which contain the name, date of birth, medical record number/barcode, and sex of the newborn, may only be implemented after transfer and replaced frequently based on hospital regulations.
Many of these mistakes are being caught at some point before families leave the hospital, which means stories of children growing up in the wrong family are rather rare. However, there are still 28,000 cases of baby switching which urges the need for methods to be implemented that prevent parents from spending time with their right baby.
This really motivated us to develop our app Baby Check! 🍼
What it does
Baby Check is an application that helps prevent baby switching and track the identity of a newborn from the initial period of birth. The app stores and analyzes information regarding the distinct cry of the baby and the unique shape of the baby’s ear to determine whether the baby is present with his/her respective family.
How we built it
Our team built the UI/UX design for our application with Figma. We developed our ear image comparison technology using SIFT feature matching.
Challenges we ran into
Most of our team members are relatively new to coding and software development and therefore, we had to self-learn and work with software and platforms that we were unfamiliar with. In addition, due to the 24-hour time constraint of the hackathon being an obstacle for our team, we were unable to develop a technology for the voice recognition system. Despite a few minor complications along the way, we worked for 18+ hours straight and we were able to work together and overcome them as a unified team!
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Our team is proud of the wireframe that we developed for our application. Although it was the first time most of our team members worked with Figma, GitHub, and HTML, it was a rewarding learning experience for all of us and allowed for the gain and growth of our individual practical skills. A solid pat on the back for each team member!
What we learned
Our team learned that baby swaps are a much more common occurrence than expected and can lead to severe negative consequences. The implementation of Baby Check can prevent serious health-related mishaps caused by mistakes in identification, which include a child receiving the wrong formula or medication, a child being breastfed by the wrong mother, lab work being misidentified, or a procedure being done on the wrong child. By using Baby Check, the first step in your journey of parenthood can be a great one!
What's next for Baby Check
The next step for our team is to develop a voice recognition system which we could not develop due to time constraints. Additionally, the accuracy of Baby Check's image comparison technology can be improved by the accumulation of more data and the development of more detailed algorithms.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.